


The House in the Woods

by a_big_apple



Series: Elysium [1]
Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: A Christmas Carol, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, F/M, Ghosts, Multi, light hints of pearlmethyst if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-11
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-16 05:07:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28701168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_big_apple/pseuds/a_big_apple
Summary: There is a house in the woods. The sort of house your eyes pass over without noticing. Webbed with ivy and hidden behind new, more interesting growth. That’s why Rose picks it—she needs a place to go unnoticed. To be alone, to shake loose her mistakes and start over.Her mistakes, unfortunately, have no other choice. When Rose moves into the house in the woods, she brings with her a troubled Past and uncertain Future.“I can’t see what will happen next,” Future says, overwhelmed. “There are too many possibilities.”“We’re in the middle of nowhere,” Past points out, sour and sad. “What possibilities could there be?”Pulled along like the tides behind the moon, Past and Future scud cloudy through the overgrown brush of the yard and linger outside the door. Rose is inside already. They don’t need to see her or hear her to know.
Relationships: Pearl/Rose Quartz (Steven Universe), Rose Quartz/Greg Universe
Series: Elysium [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2212236
Comments: 28
Kudos: 16





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> The Gems were dead: to begin with. Dead as a door-nail. That one thing you must remember, or nothing that follows will seem wondrous.
> 
> This is not as atmospheric in mid-January as it was over Christmas when I started writing, but! A few notes: please prepare yourself for crying, flashbacks (not graphic) to character deaths, and me shamelessly quoting both SU and A Christmas Carol.
> 
> Enormous thanks to [gimmeshellder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gimmeshellder) once again for the incomparable editing suggestions!!!
> 
> Also thanks to [jailor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jailor) for [The Gardener's Lover](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27404806/chapters/66980182), which was so beautiful and haunted me so much that I had to write a weird stylized thing of my own.

There is a house in the woods. The sort of house your eyes pass over without noticing. Webbed with ivy and hidden behind new, more interesting growth. That’s why Rose picks it—she needs a place to go unnoticed. To be alone, to shake loose her mistakes and start over. 

Her mistakes, unfortunately, have no other choice. When Rose moves into the house in the woods, she brings with her a troubled Past and uncertain Future. 

“I can’t see what will happen next,” Future says, overwhelmed. “There are too many possibilities.”

“We’re in the middle of nowhere,” Past points out, sour and sad. “What possibilities could there be?”

Pulled along like the tides behind the moon, Past and Future scud cloudy through the overgrown brush of the yard and linger outside the door. Rose is inside already. They don’t need to see her or hear her to know.

“How filthy is it going to be in there?” Past asks, trepidatious; Future clucks her tongue.

“You’re not going to like it.”

Then a face glimmers through the closed door. “Yo, you coming in or what?”

That’s how they find Present.

***

Present, they learn, has always been there. She woke up there, firmly and decidedly dead, with no memory of her past at all. The house has stood empty all the time she’s haunted it.

She follows Rose like a shadow, fiercely curious about _living_ , and interrogates Past and Future at every opportunity. They don’t know what to say to her. They don’t want to remember. Rose seems to sense them, _fear_ them, even, in her periphery—but she doesn’t _believe_ that they are here, tied to her, mittens linked through the sleeves of her coat. She doesn’t believe in ghosts; she thinks she is haunted by her own mind.

It doesn’t make any difference, in practice. Whether she glimpses them because they _want_ her to badly enough, or because some dyspeptic trick of her living electrics places them in her eyeline. Rose is agitated, and quiet, and low. She makes do with bare survival, the passing of days like skimming pages in a book, while Past impotently frets and Future meditates and Present moves objects about to gauge her reactions.

Lonesomeness has made a trickster of Present, they find. She’s round and jolly and wild-dark-haired, a Cheshire flash of teeth in the mirror, a chortle that might have been creaking roof beams. A wind that whips in the cracks under windows and doors, mussing Rose’s dark curls and tugging at her clothes. Most of all, she plays little games, turning a robe around the other way on a hook, leaving a perfect maple leaf where a leaf has no business turning up. Affectionately she taps out meaningless rhythms on the plumbing, and shimmers with delight the rare times Past is game to echo them on the windows.

If Present is charming, Past is more classically spectral. A wisp, pulled taffy-long; skin white as a—well. The suggestion of a pointed nose, dark hair chopped short and silvered with intangibility, the faint whiff of Chanel No. 5. Most often she is a shuddering breath, the muffled, far-off sound of weeping. But if you see her at all, you will always see her eyes, moonless 3am highways frosted over with ice. They shine wetly, unblinking, in the dark.

She thinks Rose can feel her eyes. Sometimes glimpses them, in the shadows of the bedroom. Lingering by the foot of the bed that Past wishes was _theirs._

Future is a shadow, blurred; too large for anything living. Though she’s still and quiet, her presence fills the room with pressure, a crackle, a coming storm. She is waiting. For what, even she can’t be certain.

***

They settle into an existence, the Past, the Present, the Future, and Rose. She doesn’t startle or second-guess herself when faced with Present’s foolery; she moves around the dark vague shape of Future unthinkingly, no longer notices the goosebumps when that skill fails her. She talks to Past, a little. She thinks she’s talking to herself, but Past clutches every word in covetous long fingers, gathers them up to her mouth as though the taste of them will sate her. Past weeps when Rose weeps—but the reverse is no longer true. 

Rose plants an herb garden. Her hair was hickory brown when they first came here, glinting reddish in sunlight, but now it’s threaded through with silver too; sometimes, when she bends, her knees crackle like fireplace logs. Survival softens, achingly slowly, to something approaching a life.

Once a week she goes into the town five miles away, towing Past and Future regardless of their will. Present follows as far as she can, less than a mile, and waves until they’re out of sight.

“Poor thing,” Past fondly coos. “All this time and she’s still scared we might not come back.” 

“We will,” Future declares with ominous certainty. Past tries not to let it weigh on her. Future says most things with ominous certainty, and she’s grown very attached to Present.

They trail Rose through sleepy streets to the usual places: the bank, the grocer, the five and dime, the bakery, the gas station to replenish the little she used driving in. Necessities. The town is barely a blip on the map, and every shopkeeper knows her by name—a different name, a disguise, a small-town sound. _Sharon_. But they remember her, and greet her fondly.

Today they make an extra stop. There’s a new shop on the main street, one that brings all three of them up short. Marty’s Books & Records, the sign proclaims. They know Marty—or rather, they know _of_ Marty. _Drifted into town a month ago_ , said Kofi, the grocer, _and convinced Vidalia to take him in! She is too good for him._

 _That boy is trouble,_ the grocer’s mother agrees.

Marty isn’t in evidence through the window, but Vidalia is. Rose likes Vidalia. She’s avoided making friends—for reasons Past and Future find both obvious and painful—but Vidalia could be one, if Rose allowed. 

Rose goes inside, and her companions follow.

It is, predictably, a dim and cluttered room lined with packed bookshelves and bisected by bins of LPs and 45s. Future lingers just inside the door, surveying the landscape; Past watches Rose chat to Vidalia, then drifts along a bookcase dragging ethereal fingertips over the spines. Some of them shift, just slightly, at her touch. One is a pulp novel she and Rose read aloud to each other, years ago, when she was alive. This one she concentrates on, and it _plaps_ onto the floor.

A young man she hadn’t even noticed, longhaired and suntanned and grungy, turns from the bin he was leafing through. He bends, reaches _through_ her, Past _hates that_ , and picks it up. A flush touches his cheeks, and he grins small and embarrassed. He tucks the book under his arm, and Past grimaces. Fumes as he checks his wallet, counts out the meager change inside, and takes his find to the counter.

That’s when he spots Rose.

Past watches him gape. Follows his eyes as they take in the inviting roundness of her, all pillowy curves perfect for resting a burning cheek upon. His flush deepens. Past knows that look. That feeling. She can still remember. She swipes an arm through him, fruitlessly; when her chill doesn’t cool his attention she crouches down at his feet, siphons all her energy into her fingertips.

“Uh...hi,” he says dumbly; Past hears the slide of the book across the counter. 

“Hi,” Rose replies, cool, careful. 

“ _Odd Girl Out_ , huh Greg?” Vidalia drawls. “There something you’re not telling me?”

The young man, _Greg_ , sputters out awkward nonsense. Below the counter, Past painstakingly knots his shoelaces together.

“Oh, that’s a good one,” Rose says with a burst of warmth. “I read it a long time ago.”

 _With my girlfriend_ , she doesn’t say. Past ties the knots tighter, a hot coal of feeling rising up in her throat.

The dark-smoke column that is Future shifts. “Come here,” she calls gently. “Let’s go outside and get some air.”

“We don’t need air anymore,” Past spits back, but she’s collapsing, her concentration broken. All roiling vapor, she lets Future surround her, draw her out through the dingy picture window. If anyone hears her wailing, they’ll wonder what strange bird or owl is that? and get on about their day.

Future can see what happens, what will happen, through the shop window as they float in the street. As Past wrings herself dry of tears like a shirt through the mangle. Greg will count out money for the book, emptying his meagre wallet.

“I guess you’re coming over for dinner tonight too, huh?” Vidalia will drawl. “Sharon, this is Marty’s shiftless band buddy. He lives in a van.” Greg will grin without an ounce of shame.

“That’s me, free as a bird,” he’ll say, and hold the book up, and turn his grin on Rose. “Gotta take joy wherever you find it, right? Life’s too short to hold back.”

Rose will consider this, startled. She’ll rub her bicep; it will look like bashfulness, but she’s touching the long whitened scar. Then she’ll nod, a smile creeping like early dawn over her face. “I suppose...that’s true.”

Greg will wink, playing cool. “See you ladies around!” Then he’ll take a step, and trip, and fall flat on his face. Vidalia will laugh. Greg will laugh. Rose will laugh, and help him to his feet. “I just got a job at the gas station,” he will say. “Maybe I’ll see you there sometimes?”

“Oh, of course—Jamie left for college. Yes, you’ll definitely see me there,” Rose will answer.

The possibilities race away from this moment in branching veins; they flash through Future’s consciousness before the Greg in front of her has even finished counting out his money.

She folds her presence firmer around Past, coaxes her away down the street. The most likely scenarios, the glitter far downriver of what is to come, will be the same whether Past can see it happen or not.

***

“What’s up with her?” Present asks when they drift back inside her radius. Curled in the soft center of Future’s ominous shape, Past is a stretched-thin candle wisp, almost entirely intangible.

“She exhausted herself,” Future explains. “Rose was flirting.”

“Rose doesn’t flirt,” Present says, surprised. The vague shape of her hair waves around her like water, touches Past gently. 

“Past tied his shoelaces together.”

Present snorts. “You tell ‘im, P.”

Past, unable to speak, rides cradled listlessly between them the rest of the way home.

***

Rose picks bright green-smelling herbs and glossy ripe tomatoes from the late summer remains of her garden. Hums little songs into the sauce she makes, serenades the noodles boiling in the pot, layers a tune in alongside the ricotta. 

She eats an extra serving of the lasagna, when it’s done. “Take joy wherever you find it,” she murmurs as she dishes it onto her plate. “Right?” She’s unearthed a dusty bottle of wine, and pours herself a glass. An unlit candle sits in the center of the table. She doesn’t bother trying to light it—Present always blows them out, and Rose has accepted this as evidence of an unsolvable draft—but she looks at it as though it’s glowing. 

She has a second glass of wine, and sleeps _hard._ Past watches her, soggy-eyed, refreshed by the nighttime and the shadows and the moon. Present and Future watch her too. Something is different in the house in the woods; a strange eddy in the ley of their energy, of Rose’s energy. She is living, and that has always been _attractive_ , mesmerizing as a cozy crackling fire, but tonight they feel her _pulling_ at them, tangling them in the net of her life force. It hasn’t happened this way, not once, since— 

Present, of course, has never felt this pull before; she doesn’t know how to resist, and tumbles headfirst into Rose’s dreamscape.

It looks like the house, but oddly bigger, imperceptibly moving, stretching out behind the bed like a dolly zoom. The edges are deep shadows, but Rose, at the center, is bathed in warm yellow light. She sits up. Her hair, braided back for sleep, slips forward over her shoulder. “I...know you. Don’t I?”

“Uh...kinda?” Present says, baffled; when she looks down at herself she’s more solid than she’s ever been, purply-blue like a reflection in deep water. “I...I haunt your house.”

Rose absorbs this with surprising aplomb. “Oh. You’re the one who moves things around?”

That startles a laugh out of her. “Yeah.”

“I’ve heard you laughing,” Rose says, almost dreamily. “That makes sense. Oh no, did I invade your space?”

“I mean, yeah, but I was pretty bored before, so.”

“Were you all alone? This was…a family property, but I know it was empty for years before I moved in.”

“I’ve always been alone here,” Present says, though it sticks tacky in her mouth like a lie. “Do you know anything about who was here before it was empty? I...I can’t remember.”

“I think it belonged to a cousin of my mother’s,” Rose replies, hesitant. She swings her legs around off the side of the bed, digs her toes into the rug. “I’m not sure how it got passed to my mother. But I don’t think she even remembers it exists.”

Present drifts closer. With Rose sitting down, they’re almost eye to eye. “So...I might be your cousin?”

“Maybe,” Rose agrees with a tiny smile. 

Present’s hair blows out around her in a joyful swirl of wind. “Can you ask her? Maybe find out my name? Or, or a picture? Or anything, I’d take anything!”

Rose blanches. “Ask my mother? No. No, I’m so sorry. My family doesn’t know I’m here, and I want to keep it that way.”

At once the wind dies down. Present’s hair settles. Her shoulders curl smaller. The room taffy-stretches again. “That’s what Past always says.”

“Is that...another ghost?”

Present nods as the distance between them yawns wider. “Short hair, giant eyes, beaky nose—”

“What?” Rose freezes. Stops breathing, even, like the question took the last of her air. She looks as if she’s been slapped.

“You must’ve seen her once or twice. _Heard_ her at least, some days she never shuts up.” 

Though she doesn’t seem to move, Rose’s hands are suddenly pressed tight over her mouth. Her eyes squeeze closed. She nods, twice, with agonizing slowness.

The not-bedroom heaves, _bubbles_ sudden and ferocious like a boiling pot, and the force of it blasts Present back— 

Then Past is curling around her, in the familiar nighttime dimness of the real, familiar bedroom.

“What happened? Are you all right?”

“Quit _fussing_ at me,” Present blusters, shaken, and whisks herself away.

***

Past might chase after her, if she had a chance. If she had a choice. She’s not sure, but she might. It doesn’t matter—Rose doesn’t give her a choice. Rose’s sleeping mind, her living soul, whatever it is her companions are tethered to, _yanks_ and drags Past under.

It’s the bedroom, but not the bedroom. It’s too big, too vague, too dark. Sinister.

Sitting rigid on the bed, Rose is staring at her. Covering her mouth as though she might be sick. “Pearl,” she rasps through her fingers.

Past full-body shudders. Her full body is _here_ , almost _tangible_ , and that’s a surprise. She drifts forward; stops short when Rose recoils.

“I thought...I was imagining you.”

Past wraps her arms around herself. “I know.”

“You’re actually _haunting_ me,” Rose says, tremulous, and Past drops to her knees.

“Not on purpose!” she cries. “It just _happened._ I’m sorry.”

That seems to upset Rose even more; she curls inward, shaking her head; the room around them whirls dizzyingly, settles into a car, a moonlit road. 

Rose white-knuckles the steering wheel. “Pearl,” she chokes out, and Past is in the passenger seat. The moon is bright. Too bright, two moons, moving, bearing down on them—

“Rose.” Past reels back, pressed into the seat. “Rose, this isn’t what happened.”

“Pearl,” she answers, a sob, and Past whirls on her, reaches for her, expects to reach _through_ her but she doesn’t, she _touches her,_ grips her arm, fingers over the long white scar.

“Rose! This isn’t what happened!”

The car, the world, spins around the centerpoint where they touch. 

_“Imagine if we ran away,”_ another Past says, cheeks tinged with an audacious blush.

 _“Pearl!”_ another Rose coos. _“You’re so smart.”_

_“Me and Garnet, we could get you out of here, away from them. Please, Rose. I can’t watch you hurt anymore.”_

The whirl of nighttime color around them settles again. The car. Tan leather interior. Future in the back seat, watching out the rear windshield. Past with her fingers in the wiring under the dash. A spark; a purr. Past crows in triumph, throws herself into the passenger side as Rose slides in after, and they take off, _free_ , into the night.

They drive, and drive, and drive, and it seems to take no time at all. “You need a rest,” Past says, almost scolds. “Pull over and let me drive a while.”

They play musical chairs; Past behind the wheel, Future beside her. Rose stretches out on the wide back seat, and lets the road and the radio lull her to sleep.

“Everything’s going to be different,” Past says, eyes straight ahead. She’s a good driver. A careful driver. “For all three of us.”

Future _tenses_. Past doesn’t see it. Didn’t see it. The road is empty, and then a dark shape barrels over the hilltop ahead—their headlights aren’t _on_ —she’s too slow. _Milliseconds_ too slow.

Past expects pain. Remembers it. A last convulsion of breath; a last moment of mortal terror. A _pull_ that rends her from her body and throws her from the car. _Rose_ —trapped, bleeding, screaming for her. 

It doesn’t happen. Insteadsomething _wobbles,_ something _pops_ like the barometer dropping. Everything is silent. Past is in the bedroom, just Rose’s bedroom, the same as it’s always been, with the vague sensation of the carpet against the soles of her feet.

***

“Future,” says Past, and Future is There. She can’t be anything but looming; it doesn’t matter, for them. Past curls like smoke in her direction, imprecise and billowy. If they were alive she might be shivering. If they were alive she might hook her arm through Future’s and lean tipsily into her side. “I feel strange.”

“Tell me.”

“Dizzy. That’s silly. Ghosts don’t get dizzy. But something is different. I can feel my feet.”

“I can’t see them.”

Past wriggles. “I can feel the carpet.” Her eyes take shape, mist-covered, lamps in a deep fog. They turn up to where Future’s eyes used to be. “She knows we’re here. Really knows.”

Future doesn’t know what to say to that. Doesn’t want to say that she’s seen this already, and the path forward from here is solidifying more and more each second. 

“You should talk to her. I think she’ll hear you.” Her eyes drift toward the bed. “I think. She didn’t want to see me.”

“Past.”

The curly, smoky motion of her intensifies. “I ruined everything, why would she want to see me. I’m not _trying_ to—”

“Stop. I’ll talk to her if you’ll stop working yourself up. Things are the way they are, we can’t change what’s already happened.” 

Her eyes go out like blown candles. “I’m sorry.”

With a low rumble of thunder like a sigh, Future looms a fraction more gently. “Things are shifting. I can’t tell you much more. It’s been thirty years, Past. We need to let it happen.”

Past’s eyes slide open again, dim and small. “Talk to her.”

In the bed, curled like a child, Rose is still fitfully sleeping. Brow heavy with dreams; hands clenched like blossoms closed against the night.

Past’s eyes follow Future as she rumbles across the room, leans the shadow of herself across Rose’s pale face. “Rose,” she murmurs, and instantly the bright core, the _aliveness_ in Rose reaches out, and pulls her in.

They’re in the car. _The_ car. Rose’s sister’s car, the one they stole the night they ran away. Future is in the front passenger seat; the driver’s side is empty. Rose is curled in the back seat, just as she was curled in the bed, except her eyes are open. Wide and wet, her pupils down to pinpricks. “Garnet,” she says, a soft exhale, placing the final piece of the puzzle. “You too.”

“Me too.”

“All this time?”

“Yes.”

She has no response to that; just curls around herself, traces the scar on her arm with her fingertips. Then she tips her face down, hides it in the tan leather seat. “I trapped you. Both of you.”

“You didn’t mean to.”

“You were dead,” she whispers, “and I didn’t want you to be. I begged. I begged you both not to leave me alone.” She takes a slow, expansive breath. “I don’t...I don’t know how to go on from this.”

“I can tell you,” Future says. Rose looks up at her. At _her_ ; she has a body, vague and sheer, but visible. The way Rose remembers her. _Young_. “I can see some of what’s coming.”

“How?” Rose asks. Future shrugs.

“I’m dead.”

Rose _almost_ laughs. She wriggles round more onto her side. “What can you see?”

“That young man, from the record shop.”

“But…” The slightest blush blooms on her cheeks. “Pearl.”

“She knows she can’t be with you anymore,” Future says. “It hurts her, but she knows. She’s always known.”

“It isn’t fair.” The mournful shape of her mouth compresses. “We should have had more time. I loved her. I would have married her, if I could have. Does she know that?”

Future’s head bobbles vaguely. “I’ll tell her. You can tell her if you want, when you wake up.”

“I’m asleep?” She looks around, as if she’s only now realizing that her Marigold’s stolen, totalled car no longer exists in the waking world. “Oh.”

“There’s joy coming for you, if you let him in,” Future tells her, gently. “Joy for us too. A child. A little boy, I think. But you have to be brave.”

Rose looks starstruck. “A baby? But I’m probably twice his age. And we only just met.”

Future shrugs again. “There are other possibilities, but that one has the strongest current.”

“I’ve been hiding a long time,” Rose sighs. She’s tracing the shape of the scar again.

“You don’t have to. You never had to. All you ever had to do was move forward, Rose.”

The dreamscape around them is growing vague, details falling away until the car is just blocks of color, with flat darkness beyond. Rose’s eyes are fixed on her. Pained. Cautiously hopeful. “Thank you,” she says, and the darkness _wobbles_. Future loses her footing; she can _feel_ her footing. This must be what Past described.

Between one eyeblink and the next she finds herself standing once again in the dim bedroom. Rose’s face is slack, peaceful; Past is curled into a little cloud beside the bed.

“Come on,” Future says, scuffing the vaguest impression of her feet against the carpet fibers. “She’ll sleep easier now.”


	2. Chapter Two

Rose wakes with the sun. Sits up in bed, and studies the room. Smooths her sleep-wild hair. “Um,” she says into the quiet house. “Was that...just a dream? Or are you...here?”

A warm gust of wind ruffles the collar of her nightgown, tugs at her curls. Rose startles, but nothing in it feels malevolent. It’s familiar, instead; the draft she’s never been able to fix. A quirk of old construction. She smiles.

“Ah...my cousin. Is that you?”

The wind intensifies, brings with it a far off giggle.

Rose tucks her hair more firmly behind her ears. “And...Garnet?” Painfully softly. “Pearl?”

The air crackles; her skin prickles against it, goosebumps rising. There’s a...shadow. Like a floater in her vision. There, in the corner, but only in her periphery; when she turns to look, it’s moved.

“Thank you. For what you told me. I’ll try. To. To be brave.”

The breeze is making its way around the room, billowing the curtains, knocking a lampshade askew; the shadow, _Garnet_ , remains just at the edge of her sight. Then a chill touches her. Her feet, bare against the carpet. Her knees. Her hands, clenched uncertainly in her lap. She feels... _something_. Something she couldn’t even categorize as a feeling. Like she’s being watched, very closely. This, too, is familiar, and now shockingly recontextualized.

Her mouth twists; her eyes blur. “Pearl?” she whispers. Takes a deep, trembling breath, and lets it out on a sudden sob. _Chanel No. 5._ “I can _smell_ you,” she rasps out, hands pressed to her mouth. “Pearl, Pearl, baby, oh God...I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have put you at risk, I shouldn’t have let you try to rescue me, if we’d just _stayed_ —”

The chill envelops her, prickles of ice kissing against her eyelids, her cheeks, her knuckles. When she shudders, the blanket flaps and she pulls it up around herself. 

“I love you,” she whispers fiercely, before she can lose her nerve. “I didn’t tell you enough. But I did. I do. And I miss you. Every single day. Every day, Pearl.”

With her eyes squeezed shut, she can hear every little sound she always chalked up to the house settling, the cries of birds, the rumble of a distant storm. Perfectly normal. But she hears them clearly now, and they’re not perfectly normal, are they? Never have been. The windows rattle; shadows move, crossing her eyelids. Pearl is sobbing, here in her arms, or maybe echoing from miles away. She sits, and listens, and softly cries, and they don’t leave her.

***

The house feels different, knowing she’s not alone. They can’t seem to speak to her in spite of the hundred questions she’d like to ask, so Rose narrates instead. Talks them through the August heat rising outside, the pink sundress she picks out to wear. Hesitates, awkward, at the bathroom door. “I’m hoping you usually leave me alone in here.” The pipes giggle in answer, and Rose sighs. “Well, I suppose if you do or you don’t, it’s thirty years too late to worry about it now.” 

When she gets out of the shower, three hearts are drawn in the steam on the mirror. She draws one below it, and gets on with finger-brushing her hair.

“Pearl, do you remember,” she says as she cracks two eggs into a pan, slips bread into the toaster, “when Mother let me stay over at your house and you tried to make me breakfast in the morning? Those eggs were scorched to a crisp. I’ve never seen anything as charming as you in an apron scraping charred eggs into the garbage.”

A sudden breath of frost nips her fingers, and the flame under her eggs blows out. Rose laughs. “All right, all right,” she concedes, and relights the burner. “I wish I’d known you were here sooner, I could have told every embarrassing story about you a hundred times over. And don’t think I’d forget you, Garnet,” she tells the vague shape lingering on the sidelines. “Remember when you first moved in next door? I went over to say hello and you were home alone, and when I asked where your parents were you panicked and said you were an emancipated minor?” The dark shape wobbles; the breeze chuckles through the hanging pots and pans. “Or when Pearl and I tried to teach you how to drive on the right side of the road—”

Rose bites her lip; slides her breakfast onto a plate. She lights the candle she couldn’t last night, and it gutters, but doesn’t go out.

She talks through breakfast; washes the dishes with Pearl’s chill touch at her elbow. 

It’s easy to keep talking. To push past the worry that she’s talking to no-one. They keep up their end of the conversation in every creak and crackle of the house, and it’s _easy_ to get used to it. 

She spends weeks digging through the dust of her own memories, tugging at every warped-shut drawer in her mind and pulling out sheaves of stories; each one is met with the chuckling of air through the pipes or a chill touch winding around her shoulders or the pop of her ears as the barometric pressure drops. 

It’s the same life she’s had for thirty years, and it’s _more_ , and it’s— 

She dreams about them. Just regular dreams. They don’t visit inside her sleeping mind again, but she conjures them up every night—herself too—bright as stars, exploding with potential. 

And what is she _doing_ with it?

***

It’s not Friday, but Rose is getting ready to go into town. She doesn’t tell them _why_ —she’s skipped a few weeks, spent the time at home, with them, talking to them—but when she goes, she always goes on Friday. It’s Sunday. Most of the town won’t even be _open_.

She tells them a story over breakfast and coffee, her hair still damp from a shower. The time Past’s little sister tagged along to stickball and got hit on her blind side by a wild pitch. “Oh Pearl,” she says, chuckling into her cup, “Tommy Sullivan didn’t know _half_ those curse words until that day.”

“You cursed out Tommy Sullivan??” Present cackles, gusting around the room; she’s heard so many stories by now, their whole neighborhood are like characters in a particularly loved book.

Present doesn’t seem to see that something’s _wrong_ , something’s _off_ , and it’s stretching Past thin as bubblegum with anxiety, ready to pop at any moment.

Rose slips on a pair of sandals, checks her purse. Past knows every scrap of detritus she’ll find in it. Keys, wallet, lip gloss, hard candies, old receipts, a cassette Vidalia loaned her weeks ago. Odds and ends. 

She opens the door, and pauses. Breathes, so deeply Past almost remembers what that felt like, and her shoulders drop. “I’m heading out,” she says, she never says that, usually she says “Let’s go!” like she’s inviting them along.

Well, invited or not, it doesn’t matter. Past and Future can’t help but follow.

They trail behind the car, all three of them, flickering in and out of the shadows of trees. “We’ll see you later,” Past says to Present as they near the end of her leash.

“Okay,” Present replies, chipper, and stops just before she hits her limit, rustling the foliage like she’s settling in to wait.

Future stops too, a deeper shadow among the shadows; Past curls around like a question. “What’s wrong?” 

“You’ll see,” Future says, typically ominous, and Past shudders.

“I thought you didn’t like getting dragged.”

“I don’t.”

“Then we’d better catch up,” Past insists, streams off in the direction of the road, the car, Rose. Three feet beyond Present and Future’s lingering shapes, she pulls up short. “What’s happening?” 

Present rustles the leaves. “What do you mean?”

“I can’t...I can’t go any further.” Past throws herself, as much as vapor can be thrown, toward the town; she yo-yos back with a startled cry. “I’m stuck!” She tries again—and is knocked back with more force. “ _Rose!_ ” 

“Whoa, easy P, you’ll use up all your juice like that,” Present says, winding around her in a tangle of intangible hair. 

Past writhes, sparking with static. “Let me go!”

“We can’t go any further,” Future says. “We’re tied to the house now, the same as Present.”

“What?” Past all but shrieks, and several birds take wing in a startled flurry. “How?”

Future rumbles. “She’s starting to move forward. Come on. Let’s go back to the house.”

“But _Future_ —”

“There’s nothing else we can do.”

Past struggles for a moment more; then she gives up with a shuddering sigh, going limp in Present’s hold.

“It’s not so bad,” Present assures her, shepherding her along. “You’ll see her when she comes back, and we’ll have the place to ourselves until then!”

***

They do have the house to themselves—but Rose does not come back. Not that night, nor the next day, or the next. Rose does not come back, and Future goes silent on the topic as Past frets, then beats at the edge of her range with her form until there’s barely a wisp left. Defeated, she worms into Rose’s bed, lingers there until the sheets start to frost over. 

The house in the woods is as grim again as when they first arrived, Rose terrified and grieving, Past and Future still shellshocked, and Present bouncing between them trying and failing to figure out how to make things _better_. She tries to find out what Future sees, to no avail; she tries to talk to Past, to get her out of the bed at least, but she won’t take the bait of any of their usual games. Weeks pass; months; a _year_ and more. The house is covered in a thin layer of dust; the garden dies out, thaws and grows back wild, freezes over again. 

“Come look out the window,” Present coaxes in the chilly bedroom. “It’s snowing.”

“Is it?” Past replies without moving. “I thought it was summer.”

“Nope, a winter wonderland,” Present says, undeterred by Past’s despondent tone. “Didn’t you notice how dark it’s been?”

Past shifts, just a little. “I did see the moon last night.”

“Yeah?” Present bounds onto the bed, curls around Past like a cat. “How was it?”

“Like the moon.”

“Ugh.” In a burst of warm air, Present flops back onto Rose’s pillows. “You’re impossible.”

Past doesn’t reply, and the room falls silent. Still. After a while Present starts puffing at the curtains, dislodging the dust, just to liven up the place.

Finally Past shifts, wriggles up the bed, white as frosted breath with reddened slivers for eyes. Her whisper is the sound of mice scratching in the walls. “What if she never comes back? Forgets about us?”

“We’ll still have each other,” Present whispers back, cricket-song on a summer breeze. “I know...that doesn’t seem like much. But it’s better than being alone.” Past doesn’t answer; her eyes squeeze, shining wet. She curls into the rippling spectral mass of Present’s hair. “You know,” Present says into the stillness that follows, “I’m starting to remember a little, from before. Not myself, or what being alive was like, but...today I was thinking, there used to be candles. Every window had a candle that got lit at night and blown out in the morning.”

“Why?” Past creaks.

“I dunno. Why does anybody light something on fire? It’s pretty.”

“Electric would be safer.”

“Well, the house is still here, so I definitely didn’t die in a fire.”

Past curls tighter, like a pillbug poked with a stick. “Be glad you don’t remember dying.”

“I’m not,” Present says. “It sucks that it’s hard for you, but I wish I remembered more. _Anything_. Other than the stupid candles. And I think maybe a blackberry bush.”

Sometimes, when she’s remembering too much, Past gets flickery around the edges. Staticky, like she’s tuned between channels on the TV. Present can see her face a bit, when she’s like this. Flashes of what she must have looked like living. The occasional disturbing glimpse of when she died. But after a while the flickering settles, and she’s just Past again. “Isn’t there still a box of candles in the linen closet?” she says. “Rose never knew what to do with all of them.”

The box _is_ still in the linen closet; long white tapers and candlesticks too, one for every windowsill. It takes hours and all their combined concentration to move them, get the candles in place; when Future hears them struggling and cursing she takes pity, helps them get one up the stairs to the attic room Rose never used. “I don’t know if we can do this every night,” Past says, small and vague with exhaustion.

“What else have we got to do?” Present shoots back, though she’s drained too. 

Future just hums. Dusk is falling outside, and the snow has stopped. She stretches out a lightning-lit shape that might be a hand to spark the wick. 

Together they light each candle, coming at last to the living room, looking out at the road. “Very welcoming,” Future rumbles, pleased by the path she finds they are on.

“Maybe Rose will come home,” Past wishes. Solemn, hopeful, she perches beside the candle, and watches the night.

***

They attend the candles every evening. Past carefully trims the wicks, replaces each taper as they melt away; Future sets them aflame. In the morning, Present blows each one out with gusto. It’s a way to pass the time, nights upon nights, growing longer as the solstice approaches.

On the longest night of the year, Past and Present curl up in the corners of the living room window, soaking up moonlight until they’re almost solid—outlines of who they used to be. “Didn’t you ever brush your hair in your life?” Past teases, not for the first time, and Present grins gleaming in the candle’s glow.

“No clue, but probably not. Didn’t you ever _eat_?”

Past’s knees pull in, accordion limbs and a blueish blush to her cheeks. “My whole family is skinny, I couldn’t help it.” 

“Sisters, right?”

“Three,” Past confirms, turning back to the window. “They’ll all be Rose’s age by now.”

Present fidgets, swinging her foot. “Do you think they miss you?”

“I...I hope so, at least a little. Sometimes I wonder where they are. If they have families. Children. I’d like to have nieces and nephews, I think.”

“Yeah,” Present sighs. “I guess...I must’ve had a family. But Rose didn’t know much about them. Why am I the only one who got stuck here?”

“I don’t know,” Past says, gentle. “But...like you said. At least we have each other.”

Present is never one to be sad for very long; she cracks a smile, rests her chin on the illusion of her folded arms.

“Come away from the window,” Future says, a crack of thunder from the corner of the room. She has more shape than usual too, tall and curved and imposing; Past and Present jump away as asked.

“Why?”

Future nods in the direction of the road. “Someone’s coming.”

Headlights slice through the darkness outside, bumping around a bend; gravel crackles in the long driveway. In spite of Future’s warning, Past glues her face to the glass in frantic hope. “Rose?”

“Not Rose,” Future says, and draws her away again; draws them both away, into the shadows of the room and farther, thin as paper in the spaces behind the walls.

The headlights cut out. A car door clicks open, closes; then another. Uncertain footsteps on the porch.

A knock, hesitant, at the door.

Past and Present look to Future; her face is blank, almost literally, but the rumbly cloud of her is roiling in anticipation.

Another knock, firmer, and then a voice. “Hello?” it calls. A key turns in the deadbolt; then, agonizingly slowly, the knob turns. The door creaks open. A man’s face appears. 

The man from the record shop. _Greg_. 

“Um, excuse me? Anybody home?” he tries, sliding inside. “I, ah, I kinda don’t know what to expect here, so!” He glances around, squinting in the dim light. “The candles are really nice!”

Then the wad of blankets in his arms makes a _sound_. A little coo, searching. 

“Yeah,” Greg responds as though the sound has meaning. “Kinda creepy, but your mom said we could stay here, and this place has heat, so I guess we’ll take the chance.”

Then he fumbles for a light switch, and when the overheads are on it’s painfully clear that the blanket bundle is a _baby_ , tiny and pink and crowned in dark curls that glint with a reddish tinge— 

Past shimmers, going wobbly at the edges with shock. “Where is Rose,” she whispers. “Where is _ROSE_!”

Future shushes her, wraps her and Present up in concealing darkness, even as Greg startles and twists, staring into every corner of the room. When he finds nothing, he laughs high and hysterical. “Maybe a bird or something, huh kiddo?”

The infant gurgles in reply.

“Let’s check the whole place though, just in case.”

Room by room Greg creeps his way through the house, flicking lights on, opening closet doors, keeping the baby pressed close to his chest. 

Future follows, with Past and Present curled cloudy in her grasp. “What’s going on?” Present whispers, and “Who’s this guy?” and “What about Rose?” but she gets no answers; Past just shivers, vibrating with the sort of hum that sets living people on edge even though they can’t hear it.

Up to the attic room, where Greg blows out the candle; back down to the bedroom, wreathed in Past’s lingering chill. “Cold spot, huh,” Greg murmurs to the baby; the baby gurgles, sticking out its tongue. “Okay, well. I guess nobody’s home,” he announces nervously to the house at large. “So I’m going to take a shower!” 

They watch as he arranges the baby and the blankets in Rose’s empty laundry basket, humming softly; in minutes the child is asleep, and Greg, the basket, and the baby make their way to the bathroom.

He leaves the door open, and the basket just outside; Future crouches down with Past and Present still wrapped up in her darkness, so they can see. 

“Looks like Rose,” Present admits. She’s gone small, her hair lank and still around the impression of her shoulders.

Past stretches out like smoke twisting off a stick of incense, turning circles around the basket; then with a little flash of cold she whips away into the steamy bathroom. Future lingers in the doorway, watching, silent.

When Greg gets out of the shower, he finds a message scrawled in the fog on the mirror.

_WHERE_

_IS_

_ROSE?_


	3. Chapter Three

“Okay!” Greg shouts with false cheer, pulling his clothes back on in a clammy rush. “Okay!” Scooping his sleeping son up from the basket, he peers around the hallway. “So you are here. Rose thought you might be. I, ah...I think you all must care about her, so...you should know...this baby is her son. Our son.” 

A wind blows up from nowhere, through the hall and all around him; the cry he thought was a bird before comes again as if from far away. It sounds...distressingly, achingly human now. Greg presses his back to the wall as the hallway grows darker.

“Easy there,” he pleads. “I can’t really tell if you’re mad or happy or what, but. I’m Greg. This is Steven. He’s four months old. Rose and I were taking care of him, together. In my van. That doesn’t sound great, does it? But that’s kinda why I’m here.”

From the bathroom, the distinct and pointed sound of a finger squeaking across the mirror.

“Right, yeah, I saw your message. I, ah, I don’t know how to tell you this, but Rose disappeared. I mean, left, she wasn’t kidnapped or something. She left me instructions, told me about this place. But I don’t know where she went.” 

Ever so slightly the breeze calms, warms, at odds with the chill spot that seems to sprout up to one side of him. And the darkness... _gathers_ , somehow, a single shadow at the edge of his vision. Greg tries to keep his breathing even.

“I don’t really...know what to do. I’m new at this dad thing, and _really_ new at this...ghost thing that’s happening here, and—” He swallows hard. 

Gently, a gust ruffles Steven’s downy hair. Though somehow he’s slept through the bulk of this encounter, Steven’s eyes now waver open; he yawns, nose scrunching up. Then he regards Greg with enormous dark eyes, wriggling a hand from his swaddle, and smiles.

The plumbing gives a charmed sigh; the shadow he can’t quite focus on seems to ripple. The chill is gone entirely.

“Okay,” Greg says. “Maybe...we’re gonna get along okay.”

***

Surprisingly, single parenting is marginally easier in a haunted house. Cabinet doors creak open when his hands are full; a firmly localized breeze keeps Steven from rolling off the couch while Greg is heating a bottle; gentle rainstorm sounds accompany his lullabies.

The candles in the windows light themselves every night, and blow out every morning. He tries, the first few nights, to blow them out himself for fear of a house fire, but they’re lit again as soon as his back is turned. Eventually he gives up, and lets his hosts have their way.

Soon it starts to feel _normal_ to hear them and feel them about, to talk to them, even _fun_ when he sings and the pipes bang out percussion, when he finds jokes traced into the mirror or the wind blows his hair around to make Steven cackle.

He often hears a far-off wailing, too—but he’s learning to live with it.

A bright, cold afternoon his second week there, Greg puts Steven down for a nap and then ventures out to his van. Unhooks his little TV/VCR combo, lugs it inside. “Thanks,” he says when the door clicks shut after him, and settles his prize on the coffee table. “So...Rose left me this tape,” he tells the air; he can feel the sudden shift, a change in the air pressure, as invisible attention focuses on him with laser precision. “Do you guys know what tapes are? Anyway, it was a message, for me to watch. I think it’s kinda for you to watch too.”

The curtains billow, frenzied; familiar darkness coalesces swiftly at the corner of his eye. Then the _cold_ , the chill he remembers from the first night, though he hasn’t felt it since—now it’s at his elbow, biting. 

Greg plugs in the TV, hits play, and it clacks and pops to life.

***

Rose is on the television. She’s hardly changed in a year; a little more gray, a little more tired. But she’s still _Rose_. Past wavers half in and half out of the coffee table, eyes wide and fixed, so intense Greg might actually be able to see them if the lights were off. Present is tucked right up beside her; Future lingers at their backs, a column of restless motion.

“ _Greg_ ,” Rose says, warm as the steam rising off a fresh pie. “ _You and Steven are both asleep right now, but I won’t be here when you wake up. There are some things I need to do. To move forward, with both of you, with our life together._ ” She smiles, looking just past the camera, then takes a slow breath. “ _I’m not sure when I’ll be back. I’m leaving you my keys; it’s getting colder and the two of you should have somewhere safe to stay._

“ _If you take 611 out of town, after about five miles you’ll find a house. There used to be a garden; the front door is green. That’s my house, and I want you to stay there, and wait for me._ ” Her smile shifts, slides a little sideways. “ _This is going to sound crazy. Greg, you won’t be alone there. You’ll see things, hear things, feel things, and you’ll think they’re just...a quirky old house, strange birds in the woods. They’re not._ ”

At last she looks directly into the camera, soft lines carved into the corners of her eyes. “ _They won’t harm you, or Steven. I hope...I hope they’ll look after you for me. Keep you safe until I come home. I_ will _come home._ ” 

Past presses a tendril of smoke, a hand, tenderly against the screen; pulls back when it starts to static. Rose is still looking at the camera. At them. “ _I love you. I promise I’ll come home._ ”

Then the recording cuts off, and Greg leans through them to hit the power. “So. We just have to wait, I guess,” he says. He sits on the edge of the couch, a sorrow in the curl of his shoulders that they haven’t seen in him before. “I wish y’all could really talk to me. Tell me what you think she’s doing, where you think she went. Who you are, why you’re _here_. I love Rose so much, but—” he presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. “I know the important things about her, you know? What kind of music she likes. The snort she makes when she laughs sometimes. But there’s so much I didn’t ask.”

Future rumbles, very lightly; Present pulls Past with her to the sofa too, a gentle wind gusting around them. “Where would she have gone?” Present asks into the silence.

Past heaves a sigh; her perpetually wet eyes spill over. “I...I’m not sure,” she admits.

“Greg is right,” Future says. “All we can do now is wait, and see.”

***

Steven doesn’t wait. Steven grows, and learns, and changes, every single day. He’s a mystery to the residents of the house in the woods, a completely new experience. If Present had any prior practice with babies, she doesn’t remember it, can’t remember it. Past’s living sisters were all within a year of each other, and Future was an only child. Greg is an only child too, they learn; he reads baby books to himself when Steven is sleeping, until Present blows the pages around so much that he starts reading aloud instead.

“But the books don’t explain why he can _see_ us,” Past mutters as they linger around the crib, an old-fashioned pine affair that Greg picked up at the thrift store. Steven is awake, but hasn’t fussed enough to wake his father; instead he studies his audience with saucer eyes, kicking his swaddled legs and reaching up to touch.

Present grins at him, sticks out her tongue; when he giggles she tickles his skin with her hair. “Nobody ever told him ghosts aren’t real,” she suggests, sing-song. “Did they? Nope! So he doesn’t know any better!”

“That’s ridiculous,” Past shoots back. She’s twined through the bars of the crib, and when Steven wiggles he jostles into the chill of her. “Rose knew we were real, for a day at least. Greg knows we’re real. Neither of them can see us like Steven can.”

“Maybe Steven’s _magic_.” Present’s eyes roll around in her head like a deranged toy; Steven squeals in delight. 

Past huffs in disbelief, but when Steven turns a curious gaze on her, attention caught, her eyes soften and she musters the impression of a smile. “Magic doesn’t exist.”

“Says the ghost,” Future points out. “Present, you should wake Greg. This baby will need a new nappy.”

“Yeah, in a minute,” Present agrees, sighing over the crib’s edge. “He’s just so cute like this. D’you think...if either of you lived, you’d have had kids?”

Past wriggles a little, like a wringing of hands. “They’re...fine, I suppose, objectively. But for me—” she looks up at Future, then back down at Steven— “for us, they were an expectation neither of us wanted. Part of a whole package. Be respectable. Marry a man. Obey him, and give him children. It seems so old-fashioned now, but when we were young, and alive...well, that’s what we were running away from. We were trying to help Rose, but we were trying to help ourselves too.”

“But Steven is very cute,” Future admits, showers his reaching hands with harmless static prickles.

“Yes,” Past agrees. Her smile fits more securely on her face this time. “Steven is an exception. I think, maybe...if I could have had children with Rose. I might have.”

Present’s hair swirls around her, soothing. “I guess there were probably expectations on me too,” she muses. “But maybe I would’ve wanted some lil shrimps running around. They’re pretty funny.”

As if proving a point, Steven scrunches his face with a look of intense inward focus. 

“I told you. New nappy.”

“Uh...yeah, I’ll go wake up Greg.”

***

The winter weather that’s kept them cozy inside begins to give way, melts into the fragile warmth of early spring. Steven learns to roll over, and to sit up on his own. Greg bundles him into a jacket and hat and takes him out for walks, around the yard and the weeds sprouting in the garden, further afield. They follow as far as they can, and Greg seems to intuit where the boundary lies—he doesn’t venture much past it, turning back when Present’s balmy wind is no longer touching them.

Life and unlife settle once again together into a routine. Once a week, Greg takes Steven into town. Past and Present wait at the boundary for the van to reappear; Future keeps her own company, quietly looking ahead. Greg returns with groceries, and a toy for Steven, and a book or a record from Marty’s shop.

“Vidalia’s shop now,” Greg says ruefully as he feeds Steven lunch. “Marty took off, left her and their kid behind.” He frowns a little. “Not like Rose did. He’s not coming back.” Steven mirrors his frown, grabs at the spoon. “Okay son, okay. You can do it if you want.”

Steven misses his mouth with it every time, by inches or by feet, but he seems delighted to be covered in mashed apple and carrot. Present is delighted too, cackling every time he tries to get the spoon to his mouth and deposits mush somewhere else in the splash radius; Past just frets around them, disgusted.

Future hasn’t said a word all day; doesn’t until that night, after Steven’s in bed. Greg’s put his new record on, and they’re all clustered around listening.

“The Philosophy Majors?” Past grimaces. “What kind of name is that?”

Present just grins, blowing in place, her hair dancing around them. “Something nerds who went to college would come up with. But I like the vibe. Mellow.”

“Certainly better than the last one he brought home,” Past agrees. She won’t say she likes it outright—she’s cagey that way—but her posture is loose, curved and comfortable, and that’s just as telling.

Future is coalesced near the window; the candle, burning merrily, casts strange shapes and shadows on the insides of her. She doesn’t say a word; not when she spies headlights in the distance, nor when they turn into the drive. But the others all startle when wheels hit gravel in the driveway.

Greg fumbles the tonearm up and off to the side, and in the sudden silence they hear a car door open, and click shut.

“Rose?” Past breathes, vaporous and desperate.

“Rose?” Greg murmurs, a millisecond behind.

Footsteps in the gravel; on the stones of the walk. Greg leaps off the couch as Past and Present surge forward in a tangle, and between the three of them the door whips open.

Rose is standing on the other side.


	4. Chapter Four

It’s so _much_ , all at once. Greg, his cheeks washed with tears, his arms tight around her. The air in frantic motion, stirring up her clothes and her hair with frozen touches and balmy, little prickles of static electricity. The house, her familiar house, but now there’s a record player and a television and a blanket strewn with baby toys on the floor. It feels more lived in than it ever did when she actually lived in it.

“I’m sorry I took so long,” she murmurs, kisses between Greg’s furrowed eyebrows when he looks up at her.

His face relaxes into a smile, watery and relieved. “I’m just glad you came back.”

“I promised I would,” she assures him with a cold flash of guilt. His relief suggests he might not have believed her, and...maybe she shouldn’t be surprised. But she lets him usher her inside as the door swings shut on its own behind them. “How is Steven?”

“Great!” Greg enthuses. “Growing so fast! He’s asleep, but we can go in and take a peek—”

“Yes,” she answers immediately, sets her bag down by the couch. “I’ve missed him so much. I’ve missed you both so much.” She means it; she absolutely means it, but she’s holding so many feelings just under her skin she can barely tell one from another. 

Greg doesn’t seem to mind, or sense anything amiss. He just takes her by the hand, tugs her along the hallway to the bedroom. The door is just a little ajar; he listens, then pushes it open and puts a finger to his mouth. 

Rose follows him inside. It _smells_ different. Like Greg. Like formula and baby powder. Like a spring rainstorm, and Chanel No. 5. They’re all here, mixed together in this place where she felt so alone, for so long, and she has to bite the inside of her cheek hard to keep from crying.

Wedged almost sideways in the crib, Steven sleeps flopped on his back with chubby arms starfished. He’s so much bigger than she remembers; his hair is thicker, wilder, and his face—he looks like a _person_ , like a _child_ instead of an infant. She stares, watching him breathe, quick and soft and strange.

At last Greg coaxes her away, shuts the door silently behind them. “He still looks like you,” she says as they make their way back to the living room, settle knee to knee on the couch. 

Greg chuckles, scrubs a hand through his hair. “I think he looks like you.”

It’s awkward, for just a moment. The distance of the last few months, the unanswered questions, balloon up to fill the space between them. But Greg is still holding her hand, so Rose curls their fingers together. “I have so much to tell you. And...them. I see you’ve all gotten used to each other.”

Greg’s hair flutters, mussed by a wind that carries a little cackle with it. He grins. “Yeah. We’re all getting to know each other. They _love_ Steven, he’s always giggling at things I can’t see.”

Rose squeezes her eyes shut against sudden tears. “I’m glad.”

“It would be great to know more about them,” Greg ventures, careful not to press. “How this all happened.”

“Those are three long stories,” Rose says. “And I’ll tell you everything. Maybe not all tonight, but—”

“You don’t have to.”

“I _want_ to.” She pauses; takes a deep, grounding breath. “I went home. To the house I grew up in. To get some answers, and _give_ some answers.” 

Pearl is there almost instantly—a cold spot hovering at her side, the faintest scent of her perfume. That watched feeling. Greg shivers; clearly he can feel it too.

“My childhood there was...not happy. But I had two friends. Two _best_ friends. Garnet and Pearl.” She can see Garnet in her periphery as she speaks, can feel Pearl still pressed in close. “Could you hand me my bag? I brought some photos.”

Eagerly Greg scrambles for it, leans in as she pulls out an album and opens it between them. There were precious few photos to find—special occasions, all. None that truly capture what her life was, what their lives were. All the hidden things, the rebellions, large and small. Sandlot baseball with neighborhood boys; cigarettes in the park after sundown; blue jeans and low-cut shirts that had to be snuck in and out of the house underneath respectable dresses. 

But the photos capture _something_ of her history, and she takes Greg through the album one by one. Rose and Pearl in matching uniforms, the first day of third grade. In party dresses, with Garnet, at her parents’ housewarming when they were twelve. One of Pearl’s ballet recitals, Rose and Garnet dressed for the theater, Pearl between them with a goofy smile and a long, diaphanous tutu. Their first high school dance, the three of them alone; the prom, with their dates, none of whose names she even remembers. In caps and gowns at their high school graduation. Pearl’s sisters are in that one, all together in a little clump—“Irish quadruplets,” her mother used to say with derisive disbelief, and Rose corrected “They’re Filipino, Mother,” with deliberate obtuseness—and Rose’s sisters are there too, wearing twinned severe expressions. 

Rose remembers taking that photo. Remembers the heat of the day, the bustle, the barest taste of freedom. Hidden by the voluminous sleeves of their gowns, Pearl was holding Rose’s hand.

“We were together,” Rose explains, touching the corner of the photo with tender fingers. “Pearl and I. We’d been friends for ages, but...we fell in love, and it wasn’t allowed. We hid it for years. Pearl wanted to go to college, so the three of us decided we all would, to get away. But her parents wouldn’t even let her apply. We were desperate to get out. To be on our own, live the way we wanted.” 

Greg nods, solemn. “Everyone deserves that.”

“We ran away.” Rose laughs like cracked glass. “It seems silly, to call it that. We were legal adults. But none of us had ever been on our own before. I emptied my bank account, and we stole my sister’s car and took off in the middle of the night for Empire City.”

“Pretty good place to run away to,” Greg agrees, squeezes her hands when her eyes start to fill.

“We didn’t make it there. I drove us as far as the Buckeye/Keystone border, and I let Pearl convince me to switch. She was so _precise_ , Greg. So quick on her feet. You couldn’t _find_ a safer driver.”

The cold spot is moving now, flitting around her, fretful. She closes her eyes to feel it better, to follow how it moves along her skin.

“I fell asleep in the back seat. Pearl and Garnet were singing along to the radio. ‘You Belong to Me.’ They both had incredible voices, I wish you could hear them sing.”

“I think maybe Steven has,” Greg tells her, almost shy. “They’re always around when I play and sing for him at bedtime.”

“Oh,” she replies, trembly; lifts his hands to her mouth to kiss the knuckles. He waits, patient, rubbing his thumbs over her fingers, while she gets some composure back. He’s so _good_. Surely a wonderful father, already, and it’s hard to believe she deserves him. She takes a slow breath in, filling her lungs with Chanel No. 5. “I fell asleep, and when I came to I was pinned between the seats, and. The whole front of the car was crushed.”

A distant, sorrowful sound reaches her. Pearl. Always weeping, her Pearl.

“Rose,” Greg says, so, so gently. “You don’t have to tell me any more.”

“I _do_. I do. They deserve to be _known_. They died in that car, and I had to _leave_ them there to go find help, and—” She grips the scar on her arm compulsively; with great care, Greg covers her hand with his. 

“Easy,” he soothes, but she can _see_ them behind her eyelids. Hear her own voice, screaming their names. Screaming for Pearl. “Rose,” Greg says, soft and firm. “You with me?” 

“The chill you feel, sometimes? The—the crying, that sounds like owls? The perfume? That’s Pearl,” she says, squeezing her eyes shut tighter against tears. “The shadow in the corner of your eye, the stormcloud, that’s Garnet. I think they got...stuck. I didn’t feel like I could go home, after everything that happened, and...I brought them here with me.”

Greg pulls her close, wraps her up in his hold as best he can; the cold follows, and the comforting warm wind, and the scent of a rainstorm. “I’m so sorry that happened to you,” he murmurs in her ear, “and to them. I’m glad you survived, Rose. That I get to know you now.”

She has no answer for that; just tucks her face into his shoulder, and cries.

***

Past, Present and Future wait, drifting, helpless, a pall on the room as Rose cries herself out. Then, when her tears are dried up, they watch her take a deep sighing breath and pull out of Greg’s hold. “There’s one more story to tell. I had to do a little research, but I found her.”

Greg smiles lopsidedly. “The funny one?”

“The funny one,” Rose confirms with a puff of a laugh.

Present’s hair flies _everywhere_ in her exuberance; if Past wasn’t latched onto Rose like a lamprey, she’d be blown across the room. “Take it down a notch!” she says instead, twitchy and aching with old sorrow; Future rumbles gently at her.

“Let her have this.”

“Past!” Present shouts as if she hasn’t heard them or doesn’t care. “I’m gonna find out who I am! Where I come from!” Her Cheshire grin parts on an excited scream, so loud Past feels _Rose_ flinch. 

“Then pay attention!”

“...mother’s second cousin,” Rose is saying. “She and her husband lived here with their daughters. Eight of them, if you can believe that.”

Greg looks incredulous. “ _Eight_? How did they all fit?”

“They were far apart in age—most of them were out of the house already when the youngest was born. Her name was Amethyst.”

Instantly, Present stills. Quiets, and the shape of her goes vague as she presses in close, snugs up against Past’s side.

“I never met her, when she was alive. We weren’t close to that branch of the family, and I regret it now.” Rose’s head dips, sorrowful. “She was close to my age. Maybe we could have been friends.” Quiet, a flowing tendril of Present’s hair brushes Rose’s cheek, and Rose turns her face toward it. “She was only eighteen when she died. I found her death certificate, at the Keystone vital records office. Cardiomyopathy.”

“Eighteen,” Greg repeats, looking heartbroken. 

“Cardiomyopathy,” Present murmurs, turning the word around and around on her tongue. “What’s that?”

Past curls around her. “Damage to the heart muscle, I think. ‘Myo’ is muscle in Greek.”

“Nerd,” Present declares.

“Here,” Rose says, opening the album again, “I found a photo.”

Together the living and the dead huddle over the picture, yellowed, bent at one corner. Eight sisters arrayed in an only marginally orderly line, some in dresses, some in wide-legged trousers and jackets, or work-ready overalls. One of the elder ones is cheekily smoking a pipe, her arm slung around another sibling with a wide chip-toothed smile. All of them have the same wild dark hair and warm brown skin, the same look of mischief, straight down to the littlest: a girl of no more than eight, in a gingham dress with a dirty hem and scabbed knees beneath. Her grin is biggest of all, and utterly familiar.

“That’s you,” Rose says into the air. “Amethyst.”

Present shivers; the shape of her solidifies just a little, an outline, a person. A person with a _name_. A history. She gusts out gently in all directions, circling, overwhelmed, and Rose must feel her, because she smiles. 

“When they lost you...your family couldn’t bear to stay. They moved out, passed the property on. They didn’t know you were still here waiting.”

Present’s circling whips up faster, a tiny tornado in the room. “I have a family,” she says, disbelieving, shape going blurry again; sobs it. “I have a family!” The whirl of her sends the curtains wheeling, blows the candles out, until Future holds out the vaguest shape of arms and she dives into them, overcome.

***

It’s gotten late when Rose wasn’t looking; when she yawns, Greg brushes her hair back from her face with the tenderest attention. “Let’s get some sleep,” he suggests, with a yawn of his own, “and you can tell me the rest tomorrow, huh?”

They curl together like quotation marks in her bed, the bed that’s always been empty; across the room, Steven remains angelically asleep. Her ghosts are there too—she can feel their watchful presences. Familiar, and missed. She closes her eyes, and submits to dreams.

Amethyst appears first, crawls into the bed with her like a kitten. “So we _are_ cousins,” she says, watery, and Rose nestles her close to stroke her hair. 

“We are. And you have other family too! I can write to them and ask for pictures, if you like.”

“Maybe,” Amethyst agrees. “I can remember them now, a little. My sister Jay had curly hair, like yours. And I remember...they used to tease me for being so small. But I felt safe with them, too. Like nothing bad could ever happen.”

“They must miss you very much,” Rose says, and Amethyst chews at her lip.

“I kinda hope they do, but I kinda hope they don’t. I’m not even supposed to still be here, you know? I just want to know that they’re having lives, doing what they wanna do.”

 _Is that what ghosts want?_ Rose wonders. The decades she spent hiding, stagnating—should she have been trying harder to move on? 

“I was really glad to not be alone,” Amethyst tells her, small, and Rose traces the round rise of her cheek, the glitter trail of a tear. 

“I’m glad I wasn’t alone either.”

They lay there in the quiet dream space for seconds, or hours, or years, until slowly Greg’s snoring begins to penetrate from the waking world to make Amethyst giggle. “Greg’s pretty cool,” she says, a definitive assessment, “and Steven’s _great_. You’ve got a good family.”

Rose thinks of her mother, pristine fingernails tapping on the formica kitchen countertops. Her sisters, cold, and demanding. Looking back, she thinks they must have been afraid of Mother too. Just as afraid as Rose was.

“Not them,” says Amethyst with certainty. “You can leave them behind. Look at what you’ve got _now._ ”

She does; dreams Steven, peacefully swaddled in a blanket covered with yellow stars, into the bed between them. 

“Perfect,” Amethyst says, grinning her infectious grin.

***

Rose is laying in the backseat of the car again. She remembers vividly the precise shade of the rubber mudguards on the floor; the pattern of stitching on the back of the driver’s seat. Beyond it she can see Pearl’s pale arm, her hand on the stick shift. The radio is on.

“Pearl,” Rose whispers, reaches, hooks her fingers in the crook of Pearl’s elbow. 

“Rose,” she says. There’s never been so much longing in a single sound before. Then Pearl is scrambling out of her seat, crawling over the center console and folding herself into the back in an anxious concertina of limbs. “Rose. What happened? When you went home?” 

Taking Pearl’s fluttering hands, Rose squeezes them, draws them against her chest. “Oh, Pearl, I was terrified. But it wasn’t as awful as I thought it would be.”

“Your mother—”

“Died. Last year. Lobelia lives there now. She was _very_ surprised to see me.”

“Surprised to see her sister who went missing for thirty years? You don’t say.” 

Rose snorts, presses her laugh to Pearl’s knuckles. “Don’t. She wasn’t entirely pleased, either, but she didn’t turn me away. Apparently it was a scandal, when I never turned up. There were rumors, all kinds of wild rumors.”

“That you murdered us,” Pearl catches on, with utter derision. “Unbelievable. Horrible small-town _gossipmongers_. You _didn’t,_ Rose.” She leans close, and the heat of her eyes could take Rose’s breath away. “It wasn’t your fault—”

“I know. I know that now,” Rose soothes. “I felt like it was, for so long, but.” She lets out a slow breath; twists her lips as Pearl extricates a hand, brushes Rose’s hair back with her spindly fingers. A simple touch that cuts her as surely as a blade. “I wish every day it hadn’t happened, Pearl. It wasn’t my fault, but _every day_ —”

“Shh.” Pearl doesn’t bother to hide her own tears, or wipe them away. Instead she leans in, places two precise, frosted kisses beneath Rose’s eyes. “I know. I _know_. It was _my_ fault, and—”

“No!” Rose grips her hand, the knob of her knee. “No. It wasn’t your fault either.”

“I was _driving_ —”

“He was drunk, Pearl. The other driver.” 

Pearl blinks, startled. “You found him?”

“Lobelia had the police report. He was just a kid. A drunk college kid in a fancy car, on his way home from a party. He hit us—”

“—head on,” Pearl finishes, strained. “I remember.”

“Pearl,” Rose breathes, memory behind it; then she wriggles onto her back and pulls at Pearl’s hands. “Come lay down with me.”

A moment of hesitation; Pearl blinks through a fresh waterfall of tears, chewing at her lip. Then with painstaking care, she drapes herself against Rose’s chest, lays her head down with a shivery sigh like a woman starved.

Rose keeps her there, tucked safe in the cage of her limbs; scritches her fingers through short glossy hair. Traces the scar on her forehead that she got falling off the handlebars of Rose’s bicycle when they were twelve.

“I can hear your heartbeat, even in this dream,” Pearl murmurs. “I’d forgotten what a heart sounds like.” Then she sighs, deep and resigned; a living sort of sound. “It’s over, isn’t it? All of it. Hiding, waiting. It’s over.”

“I’ll never forget about you,” Rose promises softly, with certainty. “I’ll never stop loving you, or grieving you.” 

“But you have to move on,” Pearl agrees, and Rose squeezes her.

“I don’t want to hold you here anymore,” Rose corrects, careful, the taste of her own tears in her mouth. “I’m afraid to let you go. But you should have more than this. You should have whatever comes next.”

Pearl laughs, a desolate sound. Scrubs at her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Why would I want what comes next, when you’re here?” 

“Pearl.” It comes out wet and choked, and Pearl props herself up over her, struggling to smile.

“I wish you a long life, Rose. Years upon years, filled with every joy. Don’t waste any more time.” Then Pearl leans down, trembly, and kisses her.

***

Rose and Garnet are walking in the garden. Her garden, as it was when she left, bursting with tomatoes, dotted with tenacious squash.

“You should plant pumpkins this year,” Garnet says, mild. There’s a bird perched in the cloudburst of her hair. “Steven will like them.”

“I will,” Rose promises. “Garnet—”

“You want to know what’s next.” Garnet smiles. There’s a twinkle in her mismatched eyes that Rose remembers very dearly. “Happiness, Rose. If you continue choosing it.”

She loops her arm through Garnet’s, picking her way through the turned earth where spinach and carrots and beets will grow. “What about you? And Amethyst, and Pearl?”

“We’ll find our way,” Garnet replies with an air of utter confidence. “I can’t tell you more than that.”

“All right,” Rose acquiesces. “And you’ll take care of each other?”

A solemn nod. “Yes.” 

They continue on past the garden, into the quiet woods. “You know, your parents still live in the house next door to mine,” Rose tells her as they walk. “I stopped in to see them. To tell them what I could. They have six cats now.”

That gets her a smile. “I’m glad they have someone to take care of.”

“Pearl’s family moved away, but Poppy came back. Bought the Millers’ old house. She shares it with a _roommate_ who supposedly has rainbow hair.” 

“Mmm.”

Rose laughs. “They weren’t home when I stopped by, but I made her a copy of that picture from our graduation and put it in the mailbox. With a letter, of course. I hope she’ll write back.”

“She will.”

They walk, sun-dappled and sedate, until Garnet pulls her up short. “Here,” she says. “This is as far from the house as we can go. We’d stand out here and watch for you, sometimes.”

“I’m sorry I—”

“You were right to go,” Garnet assures her. Pats her hand. “The living have to live.”

“And the dead?”

Garnet doesn’t answer; just turns them back in the direction of the house.

***

There’s a door in the attic room. They find it when they drift together up the stairs to blow out the last candle, in the still hour before dawn. It’s completely unremarkable—would barely be _noticeable_ , except for the fact that the deep cherry wood and the old brass knob don’t match any of the other doors in the house, and additionally the door has never been there before.

They linger side by side before the strange door, disturbed, perplexed, and intrigued respectively. 

“What on Earth?”

“Weird. Where d’you think it goes?”

“Only one way to find out.”

“Wait! What if...I don’t know. What if?”

“Come on, P. Don’t you want to try something new?”

They stare at the door a little longer, here in the room that once was Amethyst’s; that may soon become Steven’s. Silently, they each come to their own conclusions. 

“What about Steven?” Pearl asks, soft. Scared. “What about Rose?”

Amethyst takes her hand, lacing their fingers together; Garnet smiles.

“They’ll be just fine. Come on—it’s time. We’ll go together.”

Pearl turns a glance back down the stairs, as if she can see from here to where Rose and Greg and Steven all lay sleeping in the master bedroom of the house in the woods. Then she straightens, determinedly wipes her eyes. “Okay.”

Together, they open the door.


End file.
